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"Father—?"

The morning's mail was on a silver platter on a table at his head. Next to it was an untouched Scotch and soda. Its bubbles were dead. Stewart Buntline wasn't forty yet. He was the best looking man in town, a cross, somebody once said, between Cary Grant and a German shepherd. On his lean midsection lay a fifty-seven-dollar book, a railroad atlas of the Civil War, which his wife had given to him. That was his only enthusiasm in life, the Civil War.

"Daddy—"

Stewart snoozed on. His father had left him fourteen million dollars, tobacco money mostly. That money, churned and fertilized and hybridized and transmogrified in the hydroponic money farm of the Trust Department of the New England Seafarer's Bank and Trust Company of Boston, had increased by about eight hundred thousand dollars a year since it had been put in Stewart's name. Business seemed to be pretty good. Other than that, Stewart didn't know much about business.

Sometimes, when pressed to give his business views, he would declare roundly that he liked Polaroid. People seemed to find this vivid, that he should like Polaroid so much. Actually, he didn't know if he owned any Polaroid or not. The bank took care of things like that—the bank and the law firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee.

"Daddy—"

"Mf?"

"I wanted to make sure you—you were all right," said Lila.

"Yup," he said. He couldn't be positive about it. He opened his eyes a little, licked his dry lips. "Fine, Sweetheart."

"You can go back to sleep now."

Stewart did.

There was no reason for him not to sleep soundly, for he was represented by the same law firm that represented Senator Rosewater, and had been since he was orphaned at the age of sixteen. The partner who looked after him was Reed McAllister. Old McAllister had enclosed a piece of literature with his last letter. It was called, "A Rift Between Friends in the War of Ideas," a pamphlet published by the Pine Tree Press of the Freedom School, Box 165, Colorado Springs, Colorado. This was now serving as a bookmark in the railroad atlas.

Old McAllister generally enclosed material about creeping socialism as opposed to free enterprise, because, some twenty years before, Stewart had come into his office, a wild-eyed young man, had announced that the free enterprise system was wrong, and that he wanted to give all his money to the poor. McAllister had talked the rash young man out of it, but he continued to worry about Stewart's having a relapse. The pamphlets were prophylaxis.

McAllister needn't have bothered. Drunk or sober, pamphlets or not, Stewart was irrevocably committed to free enterprise now. He did not require the bucking up in "A Rift Between Friends in the War of Ideas," which was supposedly a letter from a conservative to close friends who were socialists without knowing it. Because he did not need to, Stewart had not read what the pamphlet had to say about the recipients of social security and other forms of welfare, which was this:

Have we really helped these people? Look at them well. Consider this specimen who is the end result of our pity! What can we say to this third generation of people to whom welfare has long since become a way of life? Observe carefully our handiwork whom we have spawned and are spawning by the millions, even in times of plenty!

They do not work and will not. Heads down, unmindful, they have neither pride nor self-respect. They are totally unreliable, not maliciously so, but like cattle who wander aimlessly. Foresight and the ability to reason have simply atrophied from long neglect. Talk to them, listen to them, work with them as I do and you realize with a kind of dull horror that they have lost all semblance of human beings except that they stand on two feet and talk—like parrots. "More. Give me more. I need more," are the only new thoughts they have learned....

They stand today as a monumental caricature of Homo sapiens, the harsh and horrible reality created by us out of our